چکیده انگلیسی

Prior studies on customer–supplier negotiations (Drake and Haka, 2008 and Van den Abbeele et al., 2009) find that negotiators who have access to relevant activity-based cost information are not always able to use this information to improve joint outcomes. Our study extends this literature by examining how the type of accountability (process and outcome accountability) influences the extent to which negotiators can obtain lower joint costs. We hypothesize and test a model that predicts that the type of accountability affects negotiated outcomes through its effect on negotiators’ fixed-pie bias revisions and the negotiation tactics they employ during customer-supplier negotiations. Results from an experiment show that negotiators held accountable for their negotiation processes are better able to reduce their fixed-pie biases and achieve lower joint costs compared to those who are held accountable for their negotiation outcomes. Using rich data based on taped negotiations, we demonstrate that the effect of accountability on joint costs is indirect through its effect on negotiators’ choice of negotiation tactics and the extent to which negotiators can reduce their fixed-pie biases.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Negotiations between customers and suppliers form a crucial part of collaborative supply chain relationships (Anderson and Dekker, 2005 and Drake and Haka, 2008). Activity-based costing (ABC) techniques, such as customer profitability analysis, enable negotiators to identify activities that drive supply chain costs, and direct their attention away from price towards quantifying and managing the total cost of the customer–supplier relationship (Anderson and Dekker, 2009a, Anderson and Dekker, 2009b and Van den Abbeele et al., 2009). Recent research has established that negotiators who share ABC information are more likely to reach agreements with higher joint outcomes (e.g., lower supply chain costs) than those who share volume-based cost information (Drake and Haka, 2008 and Van den Abbeele et al., 2009). However, these studies also show that negotiators are reluctant to share ABC information, unless they are confronted with adverse conditions such as market pressures (Drake & Haka, 2008) or more powerful negotiation partners (Van den Abbeele et al., 2009). Providing ABC information to negotiators with bargaining power also potentially increases their tendency to use confrontational and competitive negotiation tactics, further reducing joint outcomes (Van den Abbeele et al., 2009).
The organizational and psychology literatures argue that a key factor that contributes to negotiators’ unwillingness to work collaboratively is the ‘fixed-pie bias’. The fixed-pie bias refers to negotiators’ tendencies to believe that all negotiations are a fixed pie; that is, the attainment of one party’s goals precludes the other party from achieving their goals (Bazerman, 2006, De Dreu et al., 2000, Pinkley et al., 1995 and Thompson and Hastie, 1990). Such a belief results in negotiators holding incorrect assumptions about their negotiation partner’s priorities and preferences. Fixed-pie bias is potentially detrimental because it causes negotiators to focus on competing with each other rather than working collaboratively, thereby lowering the likelihood of negotiators identifying trade-off opportunities and reaching better joint outcomes (De Dreu et al., 2000). Despite the central role of the fixed-pie bias in understanding negotiation performance, the accounting literature has not investigated mechanisms that can help mitigate the negative effects of the fixed-pie bias when using accounting data.
In this study, we extend recent negotiation literature by investigating how one aspect of management control, namely type of accountability, affects negotiators’ fixed-pie bias revisions1 and performance when they are provided with ABC information during customer–supplier negotiations. The imposition of accountability underlies the principle of responsibility accounting, which calls for managers to be held responsible for their actions and performance outcomes (Bonner, 2007 and Rowe et al., 2008). Here, we compare two types of accountability, process versus outcome accountability, in an experiment where customer–supplier dyads engage in a single period negotiation over multiple issues, and have the opportunity to improve joint outcomes by taking advantage of symmetric trade-off opportunities. In our experimental setting, minimizing joint costs (i.e., total costs incurred by the customer and the supplier in each dyad) is considered desirable; both negotiating parties within a dyad have equal bargaining power and are faced with the same accountability pressure – either outcome or process accountability. Our results show that dyads which are held accountable for their negotiation processes achieve lower joint costs compared to dyads which are held accountable for their negotiation outcomes. In addition, using rich data from taped face-to-face negotiations, we demonstrate that process accountability is more effective than outcome accountability in reducing joint costs through two routes: a cognitive route where process accountability directly reduces negotiators’ fixed-pie biases, and a behavioral route where process accountability encourages negotiators to use more integrative (value-creating) negotiation tactics, which in turn, reduces their fixed-pie biases and ultimately reduces joint costs. Demonstrating the benefits of process over outcome accountability is important because many performance evaluation systems implicitly emphasize outcome accountability, such as requiring managers to justify budget variances (e.g., Rowe et al., 2008), but do not include the requirement for managers to justify the processes they undertake to arrive at these outcomes.
‘Accountability’ refers to “the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called to justify one’s beliefs, feelings and actions to others” ( Lerner & Tetlock, 1999, 255; emphasis added). Research on accountability contends that this justification requirement causes individuals to engage in more effortful processing of information before they make decisions or judgments ( Bonner, 2007, Kennedy, 1993, Lerner and Tetlock, 1999, Peecher, 1996 and Tan and Kao, 1999). Accountability literature identifies two distinct types of accountability: process accountability and outcome accountability ( Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Process accountability requires individuals to justify their decision making processes (e.g., to justify how a capital investment was selected or how negotiators reached an agreement), whereas outcome accountability requires individuals to justify their decision outcomes (e.g., to justify the success/failure of an investment or the final negotiation agreement).
In the management accounting literature, accountability is seen as a key issue in designing management control systems (e.g., Ahrens, 1996, Evans et al., 1994, Merchant and Otley, 2006 and Roberts, 1991). However, the accountability literature relating to management control systems design typically does not distinguish between process accountability and outcome accountability. Instead, this literature examines how management control systems and accounting information are used as a conduit for managers to negotiate and discharge their accountabilities to their organizational constituents. While the related literature on responsibility accounting focuses on the evaluation of managers’ performance based on their responsibilities (Cools and Slagmulder, 2009 and Rowe et al., 2008), it typically does not directly examine the cognitive and behavioral effects of justification – a key feature of accountability. Two empirical studies that directly examine the effect of accountability on managerial judgments are Libby, Salterio, and Webb (2004) and Kadous and Sedor (2004). Libby et al. manipulated process accountability and showed that process accountability improved managerial judgments compared to no accountability. Kadous and Sedor found that the requirement to justify a decision increases the likelihood of consultants recommending the escalation of a project. Kadous and Sedor’s operationalization of accountability includes both outcome and process elements.2 Thus, the management accounting literature has not examined the relative merits of process versus outcome accountability in terms of managerial judgments.
In the psychology literature, a number of studies have found that process accountability improves judgments more than outcome accountability in static judgment tasks such as escalation of commitment (Simonson & Staw, 1992), calibration and probability judgments (Siegel-Jacobs & Yates, 1996), and consistency in interview judgments (Brtek & Motowidlo, 2002). However, no prior research has compared the effect of process and outcome accountability in a negotiation context.3 Unlike static judgment tasks, negotiations are more dynamic and cognitively complex. During the negotiation process, negotiators need to make multiple judgments at various stages of the negotiation about their own interests (i.e., their priorities and preferences for the negotiation issues), their counterpart’s interests, and find a way to integrate these interests to reach an agreement. Furthermore, negotiations involve complex social interactions; negotiators need to employ appropriate negotiation tactics and respond to the negotiation tactics of the other party.
Our study makes a number of important contributions. First, our primary contribution is to show that the imposition of process accountability (compared to outcome accountability) on negotiators improves joint costs in customer–supplier negotiations. We extend prior accounting research (Drake and Haka, 2008, Masschelein et al., 2012 and Van den Abbeele et al., 2009) by investigating how the choice of management control design, namely, the imposition of process rather than outcome accountability via the performance evaluation process, enables negotiators to use ABC information more effectively to improve their negotiation performance. While prior studies show that providing negotiators with ABC information potentially enables negotiators to identify cost saving opportunities, they also find that negotiators are sometimes reluctant to share this information and fail to reach the maximum level of joint outcomes. Therefore, to maximize supply chain efficiencies, organizations need to do more than providing negotiators with useful information. One approach is to improve an organization’s management control system (Free, 2007). Our results show that by explicitly incorporating process rather than outcome accountability in the performance evaluation process, accountants can design management control systems to encourage negotiators to use integrative negotiation tactics such as providing information to, and questioning the priorities of, the other negotiation party, and ultimately, lower supply chain joint costs.
Second, Luft and Shields (2009) argue that individuals’ cognitive biases and information search processes influence how they can effectively use management accounting information to make decisions. Our study highlights the role of the fixed-pie bias in customer–supplier negotiations, a variable that has not previously been examined in the accounting literature. Importantly, our study considers the differential effect of process accountability and outcome accountability on negotiating managers’ revisions of fixed-pie biases. While the psychology literature has shown that process accountability can reduce the fixed-pie bias compared to no accountability (De Dreu et al., 2000), there has been no research on the effect of outcome accountability on the fixed-pie bias. A direct comparison between the two types of accountability is important, as our results demonstrate that the imposition of accountability is only beneficial if organizations specifically implement process accountability rather than outcome accountability.
Third, we develop and test a model that explains how process accountability enables negotiators to reach more favorable joint outcomes. Our model shows that process accountability is more effective in lowering joint costs than outcome accountability by causing negotiators to revise their fixed-pie biases, both directly and indirectly through negotiators’ greater use of integrative negotiation tactics. Our study demonstrates that cognitive factors (e.g., the fixed-pie bias) and behavioral factors (e.g., the use of different tactics during negotiation) are not independent, even though these factors tend to be examined in isolation of each other in the negotiation literature ( De Dreu & Carnevale, 2003).

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

Customer–supplier negotiation is crucial to unlocking the value in supply chains (Anderson and Dekker, 2009a, Anderson and Dekker, 2009b and Dekker, 2003). However, prior research (e.g., Drake and Haka, 2008 and Van den Abbeele et al., 2009) shows that the provision of more sophisticated and relevant accounting information alone is not sufficient to ensure that negotiators can use this information to identify mutually beneficial opportunities, and to extract maximum values out of the supply chain relationships. Rather, an organization’s management control system also plays an important role in improving supply chain performance (Free, 2007). In this study, we examine how an important aspect of management control systems, namely accountability, affects negotiators’ ability to attain lower joint costs. We find that negotiators held accountable for their negotiation processes have higher fixed-pie bias revisions and subsequently achieve lower joint costs than those held accountable for their negotiation outcomes. Through our PLS analysis, we provide evidence on how negotiators can improve their performance. Our model indicates that process accountability lowers joint costs to a greater extent than outcome accountability through two paths. First, a cognitive process path, where we find that process accountability is more effective than outcome accountability in directly increasing negotiators’ fixed-pie bias revisions (thus reducing the fixed-pie bias), and in doing so, reduces joint costs. Second, we also find a behavioral path where process accountability is more effective than outcome accountability in encouraging negotiators to employ more integrative tactics. This allows negotiators to reduce their fixed-pie biases, and ultimately, lower joint costs. In addition, we show that compared to the no accountability control group, only process accountability is effective in reducing the fixed-pie bias and improving joint costs. Detailed analysis of the negotiation tactics obtained via tape recordings of the negotiations further supports the findings that participants in the process accountability treatment are more likely to exchange information through integrative information provision and integrative questioning behaviors than participants who are accountable for negotiation outcomes.
The primary contribution of this study is to demonstrate one way in which a management control system can be designed to encourage negotiators to use cost information to reach better joint outcomes. Prior studies such as Drake and Haka (2008) and Van den Abbeele et al. (2009) find that providing negotiators with ABC information (compared to volume-based cost information) only improves negotiation outcomes when negotiators are faced with external adversities, such as adverse market conditions or a more powerful other party. In our study, both negotiation parties received ABC information; our results show that organizations can actively improve joint outcomes by imposing an appropriate type of accountability (process accountability) on negotiators. We also show that the fixed-pie bias inhibits the improvement of negotiation outcomes, and that process accountability can more effectively mitigate this bias than outcome accountability.
Despite accountability being an important concept in improving management control, there is little research that addresses how different types of accountability requirements affect managers’ decisions and behaviors. Our study adds to this literature by showing that including process accountability (instead of outcome accountability) in the evaluation of negotiators’ performance has benefits in terms of improved supply chain efficiencies. This has potential implications for other circumstances such as responsibility centre managers explaining their performance in monthly divisional review meetings (see Rowe et al., 2008). Our results suggest potential benefits of managers justifying their processes rather than outcomes in these meetings. In addition, contemporary performance measurement systems (e.g., the balanced scorecard) reflect a process-based focus on intermediate initiatives, such as improving relations with suppliers and developing new technology capabilities; under process accountability, managers could be rewarded based on their justifications of how they have taken steps to improve these intermediate processes, rather than their justifications of the final division outcomes such as divisional revenue or budget variances.
Our findings build on Pinkley et al.’s (1995) argument that poor negotiation outcomes are often the result of negotiators not having accurate information about their negotiation partner (information availability errors), as well as negotiators’ tendency to distort or ignore useful information about their negotiation partner (information processing errors). We develop and test a path model to show that process accountability is more effective than outcome accountability in assisting negotiators to address both errors: through the employment of more integrative tactics negotiators can obtain more information about their negotiation partner’s preferences, and at the same time, the direct path from accountability to fixed-pie bias revisions suggests that process accountability also reduces negotiators’ information processing errors, independent of the negotiation tactics employed.
Our study also contributes to the negotiation literature by directly comparing the effect of process and outcome accountability on the fixed-pie bias and negotiation performance. Unlike prior studies such as De Dreu et al. (2000), which only examined process accountability, or Carnevale, Pruitt, and Seilheimer (1981) and O’Connor (1997) which only examined outcome accountability, this study directly compares the effect of the two different types of accountability on negotiation behavior and outcomes. Importantly, we show that the type of accountability influences both the negotiators’ cognitive processes (fixed-pie bias revisions) and behavior (negotiation tactics). As De Dreu and Carnevale (2003) have noted, prior negotiation literature often considers these processes in isolation. Our model shows that the behavior of negotiators influences their ability to overcome cognitive biases, and in doing so, we demonstrate the importance of incorporating both factors concurrently when conducting negotiation research.
Our study has a number of limitations, which also suggest several opportunities for future research. First, the cost functions of all service-related costs in our study were linear. There is the opportunity for future research to examine the role of accountability in situations where non-linear cost functions make trade-off opportunities more difficult to identify. Second, the negotiations in our study occur during one period. In some circumstances, the same parties may negotiate multiple rounds over a number of years, and this may introduce additional considerations, such as each party’s negotiation reputation (e.g., Tinsley, O’Connor, & Sullivan, 2002). Third, the current study focuses on negotiations between two parties. However, customer–supplier negotiations sometimes involve multiple parties (Anderson & Dekker, 2009a). Future research can investigate whether process accountability continues to have a positive effect on negotiation outcomes in a more complex negotiation environment. Fourth, another design feature of our experiments is that the trade-off issues for negotiators were symmetrical in value. However, in some circumstances one negotiation party may have a greater ability to contribute to expanding the negotiation pie, and this may affect negotiation outcomes.
Future research could also examine the wider implications of our research for the design of management control systems. This literature has long argued for the importance of responsibility accounting, which implies holding managers accountable for their actions in order to improve effort and performance outcomes (Rowe et al., 2008). While the existing research on responsibility accounting tends to focus on the basis upon which managers should be held accountable for (e.g., cost versus profit, individual versus team outcomes), our study suggests that designers of management control systems also need to consider the type of accountability imposed on managers. For example, while organizations often require managers to justify performance outcomes such as budget variances (Rowe et al., 2008), it may be desirable if these managers are made to account for the processes leading to these outcomes, such as the initiatives they had in place to reduce manufacturing overhead costs. Seen in this light, process accountability is similar to the notion of a balanced scorecard, which encourages managers to be held responsible for the ‘causes’ of outcomes (i.e., the lead measures and initiatives). Research could explore whether process accountability in conjunction with a balanced scorecard system can have positive effects on other types of managerial tasks.